Samsung Instinct: $200 with a two-year contract

PhoneNews got some hot insider info from Sprint on the pricing and market positioning of Samsung’s Instinct. This smartphone is, apparently, to be pit against Apple’s new weapon, the iPhone 3G – while its full retail price will be $449.99, you can shave $150 off that if you sign a two year contract with Sprint, and another $100 if you use a mail-in rebate. The price of Samsung Instinct then comes to only $199.99.

There’s a catch though – using Instinct in Sprint’s network will require you to sign up for their “Simply Everything” plan that we wrote about two weeks ago, and which apparently costs $70/month. The features listed are not unlike those found in plans available for iPhone (even better, it seems), so this once again puts Instinct in a competitive position.

Similarly AT&T will be charging a $10/month extra from new iPhone 3G customers which will help them recover their subsidies on the device. It is estimated that iPhone will cost AT&T $1 billion this year, but of course lower price should help the company in it’s fight to regain the #1 spot among US wireless carriers after the Verizon/Alltel merger.

Samsung Instinct will be available in stores on June 20 and unlike it’s competitor will have both retail and after-rebate price listed, so customers who don’t want to sign a 2-year contract with Sprint will still be able to get the phone, albeit for a noticeably higher price.

As for the competition between Instinct and iPhone, despite Sprint reportedly spending $100 million in advertising, I don’t find it very likely that it will manage to put a noticeable dent in the market share of this beast. Ironically after several “iPhone killers” the real one appears to be iPhone 3G.